Celebrating the Electress Palatine, Florence’s last Medici heir and savior

Re-enactor of Anna Maria Luisa de Medici, Electress Palatine. stands next to the portrait of the real one. Photo courtesy the Palazzo Vecchio.On February 18th, Florence’s museums will commemorate the 281st anniversary of the death of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, Electress Palatine, savior of Florence’s immense artistic heritage, with free admission to its museums. Florence celebrates the Electress’ great wisdom, tenacity and foresight in the disposition of her family’s inestimable legacy every year on this day, and every year the celebrations get more elaborate. The Palazzo Vecchio will be giving visitors the opportunities to converse with the Electress herself (in the form of a historical re-enactor, that is).

Anna Maria Luisa was the last of her dynasty, and after her death, the enormous artistic and architectural patrimony of the Medici was inherited by Francis Stephen of Lorraine, husband of Empress Maria Teresa of Austria, who would certainly have scattered it all, taking what he wanted to Vienna, melting down objects he didn’t care to keep, busting up Anna Maria’s legendary jewelry collection to sell the stones and selling off the innumerable artworks, objects and furnishings that today draw millions of tourists to Florence to the highest bidder. It is only thanks to the Family Pact she negotiated that the cultural treasures of Florence remained intact and in Florence instead of dispersed or destroyed. She died in the Pitti Palace (one of the museums offering free admission on the 18th) and her portrait welcomes visitors at the entrance to the Uffizi Gallery, an institution she created by stipulating in the Pact that it be transformed from the private family art gallery into one of the first public museums in Europe.

With her childlessness and death at the crux of Florence’s destiny, historians have hypothesized that syphilis, contracted from her philandering but much-loved husband, was the cause of both. Her body was exhumed in late 2012 as part of a collaborative project to assess damage caused to the family burials in the Medici Chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo. Osteological examination found no evidence of syphilis, to everyone’s surprise. Even Anna Maria herself was convinced she had it.

Contemporary sources, including the British diplomat Horace Mann, chronicle that in the winter of 1741, an “ugly evil began to open itself on one side of the breast, and was examined and considered by Dr. Franchi to be unhealable.” The lesion was also described as a “deep plague under the left breast, which keeps getting deeper and wider and continuously emits an acrid, biting liquid, and sometimes a small hemorrhage of blood.”

Anna Maria thought the “ugly evil” was a syphilitic ulcer and, fearful that it would expose her beloved late husband for his many sins and posthumously destroy his reputation, refused to be seen by anyone besides Dr. Franchi and her ladies in waiting. Over the next two years, her health declined steadily as she isolated herself in her rooms. Soon she was so weak she could not get out of bed. A fervently devout woman, the Electress was unable to attend mass at her private chapel even in a wheelchair.

The morning of February 18th, 1743, she “rendered her soul to God.” It was Carnivale time, and Anna Maria’s death cast a profound pall on Florence. Horace Mann wrote: “All of our happiness is finished. The Carnivale is ruined and we must cancel all of the costume parties: The Electress died an hour ago.”

Shortly before her death, she wrote instructions on the disposition of her body. She wanted only her ladies to wash her face and hands before burial. She did not want her cadaver “uncovered or opened up,” and wanted to be buried immediately. That did not happen. The Medici had a centuries-old tradition of removing organs and embalming their dead family members, and when her body was exhumed from the crypt in the Basilica of San Lorenzo 270 years later, her viscera and lungs were found in a separate vessel.

When the exhumation took place in October of 2012, the research team took extraordinary measures to grant the Electress some measure of the dignity she had sought. For the week her coffin and its contents were examined, view of the tomb was blocked by opaque plastic sheeting. The remains were 3D scanned so they could be studied virtually while her actual bones returned to their final resting place. DNA was also taken from a bone fragment and from the organs interred separately. Breast cancer now seems the most likely cause of death, but the results of the investigation have not yet been published.

Colossus of Constantine returns to Rome

The full-sized reconstruction of the colossal statue of Constantine that once stood in the Basilica of Maxentius in the Roman Forum has gone on display in the garden of the Villa Caffarelli Garden, just behind the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill where the surviving fragments of the original statue are exhibited in the entrance courtyard.

The original colossus was an acrolith (a composite where the head, chest and limbs are made of expensive materials while the hidden structural elements were wood covered with draped clothing) of Constantine seated and enthroned in the style of the cult statue of Jupiter in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline. It may have even been reworked from a statue of Jupiter, as there is evidence the head was recarved from a figure with a high forehead and a beard into the clean-shaven, wavy-banged Constantine. Created between 312 and 315 A.D., the colossus was placed in the western apse of the Basilica Nova, also known as the Basilica of Maxentius. After the Fall of Rome, the statue was looted for the gilded bronze draped around the body and broken up. Nine pieces of it, including the head, hand, foot and knee, were unearthed in 1486 and relocated to the Palazzo dei Conservatori by Michelangelo when he was working on the Capitoline piazza in 1536–1546. A tenth fragment was found in 1951.

The reconstruction was a joint collaboration between the Capitoline Superintendency, the Fondazione Prada and Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Preservation. In 2022, the Factum Foundation scanned the 10 surviving fragments of the statue in ultra-high resolution and used the data to create a 3D model, extrapolating the lost parts from the shape and size of the fragments and from surviving examples of smaller-scale statues of seated and enthroned deities/emperors.

Once the model was mapped out, the material reconstruction was carried out using resin, polyurethane, marble powder, plaster and gold leaf on an aluminum support to make a light-weight but visually accurate replica of the massive original statue. The finished reconstruction is more than 40 feet high.

The new colossus made its debut at the Fondazione Prada in Milan last year. On Tuesday, February 6th, the Colossus of Constantine was unveiled in Rome. Visitors will be able to see the surviving fragments at the Capitoline Museums then pop over to the beautiful garden of the Villa Caffarelli to see what they looked like before they were fragments.

Rediscovered Guercino Moses joins his David at Waddesdon Manor

A long-lost painting of Moses by Italian Baroque master Guercino has been acquired by the Jacob Rothschild Foundation for the permanent collection of Waddesdon Manor. It will make its English debut on March 20th at a new exhibition dedicated to the artist, Guercino at Waddesdon: King David and the Wise Women. The exhibition will feature five paintings by Guercino, including Waddesdon’s own King David.

The painting was rediscovered in November 2022 when it came up for auction in Paris attributed to a nameless painter of the Bologna school. The auction house’s experts hypothesized it may have been the work of a student of Guido Reni’s. Guercino was another possibility, based on comparisons with a known work of his, Head of an Old Man, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford that has a very similar composition: an old man with a cottony white beard looking up, his face bathed in light. There was also a copy of the same Moses by a pupil of Guercino’s, Bendetto Zalone, that sold at auction in 2001.

The presale estimate was a modest €5,000-6,000 ($5,175–$6,200), but when the hammer fell, the buyer had paid 100 times that amount, likely rolling the dice that the unattributed work could be a lost work by the Baroque master. Paintings by Guercino don’t come up for auction often, and the current record for one of his paintings, set in 2010, is £5.2 million ($6.6 million), even more than 10 times the €590,000 ($610,000) Moses went for.

In September 2023, Moses re-emerged at the Moretti Fine Art gallery. It turned out that Fabrizio Moretti, owner of the gallery and Old Master expert, was the mystery buyer. He rolled the dice happily, believing at first glance that Moses was an authentic Guercino. In the ten months since the auction, the painting was professionally cleaned and thoroughly researched to establish its provenance. Experts Letizia Treves, formerly of London’s National Gallery, and Keith Christiansen, formerly of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, conclusively attributed the painting to the Baroque master.

Moses is a masterpiece of Guercino’s Prima Maniera – used to describe the paintings he produced in Cento outside Bologna before a sojourn to Rome in 1621-23 – and is datable to about 1618-19, a time in which the young Guercino was greatly in demand producing altarpieces for churches in Cento as well as easel paintings for an ever-growing private clientele. The light, fluid and painterly touch in Guercino’s Moses may be compared to that in his King David, datable to a year or two earlier (c. 1617-18, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen) and the Head of an Old Man (c. 1619-20, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), which shares Moses’s tightly cropped bust-length format. Guercino appears to have used the same model for the painting as the figure of Elijah in Elijah Fed by Ravens (1620, National Gallery, London), likely using a tracing or cartoon of Moses’s head for the figure of Elijah, reversing it in the process and turning it slightly.

Moses is first recorded in 1624, in the eminent collection of cardinal Alessandro d’Este (1568–1624) in Rome, a patron of Guercino who almost certainly knew him during the period the painter resided in the city 1621–23. Although this period post-dates the execution of Moses, Guercino may have sold or given the painting to the cardinal to strengthen ties with him and his family. Indeed, from 1630 for a period spanning two decades, Guercino enjoyed the patronage and support of the Este in the form of the Duke Francesco I d’Este (1610–1658), the cardinal’s nephew. Following the death of cardinal Alessandro d’Este, the painting entered the renowned Este ducal collections in Modena and remained there until the Napoleonic era, whereupon it was taken to France during the Napoleonic occupation of the Duchy of Modena (1796–97) and all trace of the painting was lost. Prior to its rediscovery, Guercino’s Moses was known through seventeenth-century painted copies, a drawing and engravings, all of which attest to the work’s art historical significance.

The painting, restored to its former brilliance and to its identity, was displayed at Moretti Fine Art’s Paris gallery with a new price tag of €2 million ($2.2 million). The Jacob Rothschild Foundation snapped it up so Moses can keep King David company in the exceptional art collection at Waddesdon Manor, the palatial estate purpose-built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the late 19th century to house his art collection.

Thief of Ruby Slippers thought they were real rubies

The perpetrator of the daring 2005 smash-and-grab theft of a pair of Ruby Sippers from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, turns out to be surprisingly clueless. Terry Martin managed to steal the iconic shoes, one of only four surviving pairs of the slippers worn by Judy Garland playing Dorothy in 1939 production of The Wizard of Oz, in less than a minute and keep them under wraps for 13 years, even as authorities and fans never stopped searching for them. Despite this appearance of competence, according to a filing made by his lawyer before his sentencing Monday, Terry Martin thought the Ruby Slippers were festooned with actual rubies rather than dyed glass beads and sequins.

It beggars belief, but apparently Mr. Martin, who was 57 years old at the time of the theft and was born nine years after the movie’s initial theatrical release, figured they had to be real rubies to justify the million dollars they were insured for. His cunning plan was to pry the rubies off and sell them piecemeal so nobody would be able to trace their origin. He only realized his mistake when a jewel fence he took one of the beads to broke the news that it was made of glass.

Martin had dealt in stolen jewels and had spent time in prison for burglary, his lawyer said. But he had been out of prison for 10 years at the time of the theft and was living quietly in Grand Rapids, a small city 80 miles northwest of Duluth, when an “old mob associate” contacted him about “a job,” his lawyer wrote.

Martin was initially reluctant to get involved, DeKrey wrote. But “old Terry” beat out “new Terry,” and he gave in to the temptation for “one last score,” his lawyer said. […]

Martin used a hammer to smash two window panes in a door of the Judy Garland Museum and broke open a plexiglass case holding the shoes, leaving behind a single red sequin and no fingerprints, court documents said.

But less than two days later, when the unnamed person who traded in stolen jewels told Martin that the gems were worthless replicas, “Terry angrily decided to simply cut his losses and move on,” DeKrey wrote. “He gave the slippers to the associate who had recruited him for the job and told the man that he never wanted to see them again.”

He was serious about that. Martin was only busted in 2018 when other parties tried to blackmail the insurance company for hundreds of thousands of dollars in return for the shoes. The FBI recovered the slippers in a sting operation, but the blackmailers, who were probably organized crime figures, and the mobster who originally recruited Martin back in 2005 were not arrested. Martin refused to implicate anyone else. He just pled guilty to the theft and is facing his fate alone.

His sentence was gentle. Martin has COPD and is in the last months of his life. He was sentenced to time served, a year of probation and to pay the museum $23,000 in restitution for the theft.

Denmark’s oldest runes found on knife blade

Archaeologists at the Museum Odense have identified Denmark’s oldest runes inscribed on a 1,850-year-old knife blade. The inscription consists of five runes with three depressions that runologists have interpreted as “hirila,” meaning “Little Sword.” The runic script is Proto-Norse, the oldest known runic alphabet, and the context dates the blade to around 150 A.D.

The knife was discovered by Museum Odense archaeologists in a burial ground in Tietgenbyen, east of Odense. It was one of several artifacts in an urn grave. Among the grave goods were three fibulae of a type that was only in use for a very brief period in the mid-2nd century A.D., the Early Roman Iron Age. The knife blade could then be indirectly dated to around the same time.

When the blade was first unearthed, it was coated in a layer of rust that obscured the inscription. Conservators spotted the runes after cleaning the corrosion and contacted National Museum runologist Lisbeth Imer. She examined the blade under a microscope and was able to translate the runic inscription.

Whether hirila is the name of the knife itself, or whether it is the name of the knife’s owner, Museum Odense archaeologists cannot determine with certainty. But there is no doubt that it was a treasured possession that ended up in the grave near Odense almost 2,000 years ago.

Runologist Lisbeth Imer from the National Museum says:

“It is incredibly rare that we find runes that are as old as on this knife, and it is a unique opportunity to learn more about Denmark’s earliest written language and thus also about the language that was actually spoken in the Iron Age. At that time in ancient times, literacy was not particularly widespread, and being able to read and write was therefore associated with a special status and power. At the beginning of the history of the runes, the scribes constituted a small intellectual elite, and the first traces of these people in Denmark are found on Funen.

Only one other runic inscription from this early period is known. It too was found on Funen less than 10 miles from Tietgenbyen but in 1865. It is a small bone comb inscribed with the runes “harja,” which either means “comb” or is a personal name.

“Little Sword” will be going on display in a new exhibition at the Museum Odense’s Møntergården museum from February 2nd through April 7th. It will be accompanied by other artifacts recovered from the Iron Age burial ground.